aa5 wrote:I am honestly not sure how to stop this. It seems societies come out of a disastrous period, and have visionary people rise up and build new institutions in society, and go so far, then those founders die and careerists take over and the descent begins.

That's pretty astute. Luckily it's not universal. I have visited and been to communities that have found various ways (not some patented(TM) way) of solving it. And it's different for every community. You just have to travel enough out of the normal zone to find the threshold of the global insanity. It's like swiss cheese.

However, I think as you scale up this problem beyond Dunbar's number to the size of massive corporations, incorporated townships, nations and continents, you increasingly find the need for heroic levels of vision in the visionary people. And human weakness begins to take over at that point.

The most amazing and successful and self-sustaining communities I have seen have avoided the taint and evil of celebrity, which seems to be one of the main foods of parasites and what you call careerists.

hoi.polloi » December 5th, 2016, 7:19 am wrote:That's pretty astute. Luckily it's not universal. I have visited and been to communities that have found various ways (not some patented(TM) way) of solving it. And it's different for every community. You just have to travel enough out of the normal zone to find the threshold of the global insanity. It's like swiss cheese.

However, I think as you scale up this problem beyond Dunbar's number to the size of massive corporations, incorporated townships, nations and continents, you increasingly find the need for heroic levels of vision in the visionary people. And human weakness begins to take over at that point.

The most amazing and successful and self-sustaining communities I have seen have avoided the taint and evil of celebrity, which seems to be one of the main foods of parasites and what you call careerists.

Ya, I define my term careerists, as people who have not the slightest interest or care about the line of work they are in, instead they want money, higher position for status, job security, etc. I worked in banking for a number of years, and only on the rarest of occasions was there any pride in the work. It was all about cya and trying to hit targets whether it made any sense for the clients or not. It was really frustrating because with people who truly have no interest in a profession, they don't have the slightest clue on how the profession works or why there is the profession in society.

That Dunbar number sounds highly useful because it gives a scientific basis for how to divide into groups with independent decision making. It might not be perfect, but it gives a good starting foundation. In my city it is divided into ~10 municipalities. As an example, some of those 10 municipalities are rabidly anti-development, while a couple are rabidly pro-development, with most somewhere in the middle. This lets people decide what is best for their community, and then like minded people to move to that community.

The 150 limit number could be say a neighborhood within a municipality. And of course for many or most things, the best person to decide is the indivudual themselves.

Where I see a great challenge with this, is that in some industries there is things that are not possible for a small corporation to do. The scale advantages of making like 1 million Toyota Corollas vs. making a few hundred of a limited production car. Notably though, I notice corporations are changing from these huge 100,000 person corporations, to a series of corporations which contract out to other corporations.

For example a huge corporation will win the bid to create an electrical plant. This corporation will handle the financing and the high level project management. By the time it gets down to say the local concrete corporation pouring the foundation, they have less than that 150 number. In those projects today, the big corporation even contracts out to firms like law firms & environmental engineering firms to handle the regulatory interface.

Industrialized war is also impossible at smaller scales. So the question starts to become: was the industrial revolution a symptom of a human-spread psychological disease? Or was it actually good?

Of course 3D-printers will be defining our future from now on, and the industrial revolution enabled them. But you can theoretically make a simple 3D printer that utilizes salt water and builds 3D salt sculptures. And after all, we've pretty much carved or molded everything prior to now. And there is not much talk of growing creations except by sort of hijacking and hybridizing what nature already does. But — hey, here we are on computers enabled by factory workers. I just think people tend to imagine this as much more glorious than it actually is. Ten thousand human fingers or more touched and pressed and pulled and smashed things together to make our Internet devices. That doesn't count the resources gobbled up to feed the next version. (That's why I try to use refurbished computers rather than always buy new parts but that's another topic.) Human organization is a main "technology" that enabled this. Just because we don't know how to do it with fewer people doesn't mean ways don't exist we haven't explored because we are used to being used in the way we are.

Back to the population topic, it seems this "overpopulation" meme has been the excuse for the need to industrialize and mechanize everything, including terrorism and war lately, when no other excuse seems viable to a sane population.

But yes, I see your point. There are certain large scale things which start to involve cultural ties and bonds. My argument would be that Dunbar's number previously defined bands of humans before agricultural warlords attracted squabbling bands to work together (if slightly unwillingly), and it was that change which brought us to our present evolution of chaos.

It's perhaps impossible to but speculate about what technology we would have developed differently if everything were warring squabbling bands of humans allied by culture instead of warring nations allied by money interests of the psychos. Unfortunately, I don't know if it would be a huge improvement after all. Bombs are horrific, but so is a plain old machete massacre. We should still try a civilization that isn't controlled by bloodthirsty idiots. Surely, that would be an improvement.

The model I believe in is a social credit system, where a national dividend is given to all citizens. In time the national dividend can get big enough that people have the option not to work. When they have the option not to work, it gives them much more negotiating power. I see that with retired professionals, who also saved up a lot of money throughout their careers, and have pensions & sometimes inheritances.

On an individual level I see married couples where both have had good jobs for many years. Yet somehow still have no savings and are deep in debt. While they blame society for turning them into a wage slave, they could have had dramatically more economic freedom today, if they had modestly reduced their spending over a long period of time(and taken on less debt, so less interest payments through time).

In our Anglo-Saxon societies we also seem strangely unwilling to work with family, friends and others to develop our own organizations and capital. People would rather have these impersonal economic relationships, like where they are a replaceable cog in some mega corporation or mega government agency, and where as much as they complain about Wall Street, they would rather trust investments to Wall Street than to invest locally with family and friends. Its like a vicious circle of dependency.

This website is well designed and has a useful table where you can sort countries by population, pop density, net growth, net migration, fertility, etc. It uses the data and estimates from the United Nations. I was curious to see the estimate of population growth during 2016. Their estimate is the world added a net of 83 million people.

Using the worldometers.info website I sorted all the countries by which countries added the most people during 2016. Nigeria allegedly added 4.8 million people in just the last year. Which exceeds the entire state of Louisiana population of 4.7 million people. Not to be outdone, India allegedly added 15.7 million, which exceeds Illinois population of 12.8 million.

Nigeria also is said to have a population density 6 times the USA. While also having agricultural productivity at only a fraction of the world leading US level.

I read somewhere recently that 4 billion people, more than half the people on Earth, have no permanent address.

In parts of Latin America addresses are quite nonspecific.

"Opposite the church, 500 meters north of the cedar tree, the blue house with a wooden porch." In many parts of Latin America, these are not just the directions you might be given by a friendly local, but an actual postal address.

Costa Rica, Panama, and Nicaragua are among the countries that use landmarks, such as schools, parks, or even fast food restaurants, to locate houses and businesses in bizarre address systems that make mailmen "more like detectives," said one regional newspaper last month. ...Around 1.7 million mail items were lost in Ecuador last year, despite the use of street names and house numbers...In Costa Rica meanwhile, a quarter of all mail never reaches its destination. A 2008 study estimated that the lack of systematic addresses and signage costs the country $720 million annually.

An envelope once arrived to the capital city of San Jose's central post office headquarters addressed: "To the man who is sometimes outside the post office." That letter did apparently reach its intended recipient.

"People know all about the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez but they don't realize that in many ways Latin Americans are actually living it," says Pablo Villalva, communications head at Ecuador's ANP.

I'm sure in parts of Africa and Asia addresses are even less precise than in Latin America, such as in deserts and jungles.

Without precise addresses for people, how in the world could any of these governments count the people inside their borders with specificity and confidence? 82 million people in Congo - why should anyone believe that number, especially for a country with quite a small number of miles of paved roads? Even in the US it is a little difficult to believe precise numbers, given the trouble charities have trying to count total homeless in a city.

Interesting post. I had never thought of the problem with merely permanent address, or even having an address on houses. Related to that I have heard a significant reason why Latin America has trouble is unclear property rights. The descriptions of property boundaries sounded just like the descriptions of 'addresses'.

Probably something that has carried forward from ancient Spanish law, and the law code of a nation is intentionally very difficult to change.

You are asking the right question.. why should we believe the claim of the Congo? Whereas people wanting to make you believe them, say that you have to disprove their story, before you are allowed to not believe.

Let's keep this one under the radar at the moment...or TPTB will be using our forum to demonstrate why they need to micro-chip the whole world so that they will then know the correct number [for taxing, enslaving purposes] of the world's population!

fbenario » 19 Jan 2017, 02:21 wrote:Without precise addresses for people, how in the world could any of these governments count the people inside their borders with specificity and confidence? 82 million people in Congo - why should anyone believe that number, especially for a country with quite a small number of miles of paved roads? Even in the US it is a little difficult to believe precise numbers, given the trouble charities have trying to count total homeless in a city.

When I compared the latest list (Total Population - Both Sexes, as of 1st July 2015) with the two older ones (2010 and 2012) I noticed that the world population numbers have changed through the updates, both up and down. Take the first number for example:World population in 1950 in the 2010 version: 2,532,229,000World population in 1950 in the 2012 version: 2,525,779,000World population in 1950 in the 2015 version: 2,525,149,000

Example of a single country:Population of China in 1950 in the 2010 version: 550,771,000Population of China in 1950 in the 2012 version: 543,776,000Population of China in 1950 in the 2015 version: 544,113,000

This begs the question which of the 7 million Chinese people listed in the 2010 version were dropped two years later from the 2012 version? Although...since these are only estimates, one can't say for sure that actual people have been erased from the list, only the estimates have been changed. But why is this done in years that are already decades ago?

In other statistics like in economics, they sometimes adjust the methodology for the current year. Officially, they revise the past years to have an estimate using the new methodology for those prior years, to get a better comparison. Possibly they are using the same argument for past revisions. Of course one can speculate they do things like adjust unemployment estimates upwards in prior years, so that it appears unemployment is actually falling, instead of rising.

This brings up another important aspect. The way in which the data is presented in school classrooms, and in the media. It is presented like these developing countries are like America where near on everyone has a SSN, all births at hospitals are recorded, birth certificates given, and we imagine a big computer database giving us a pretty accurate count of the population.

What we don't imagine is guys sitting in government office buildings with paper and pencils(and erasers), in a highly politicized 'count'. Like political appointees deciding which ethnic groups and which regions have more people.

99% of the potential bias seems to lean towards over-counting. For example government 'statisticians' could not make a rival ethnic group go down in number as it would be hard to believe. But they could over-estimate the growth of their own ethnic group. For hitting climate change goals, a country which estimates three times the population it already has is going to look good on per-capita emissions.

Meanwhile, say the developing countries were paid transfers from industrialized countries, based on how much they brought down their birth rate and population growth? You can imagine what that would do to next years 'estimates.'

The 2015 Revision of World Population Prospects is the twenty-fourth round of official United Nations population estimates and projections that have been prepared by the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat.

From: https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Any idea where we could find the old "rounds"?By the way, the link above also provides the data sources for the estimates (click on the last symbol).

The description to the spreadsheets reads "De facto population". Here's what it means (taken from the OECD Glossary of Statistical Terms):

"The de facto population is a concept under which individuals (or vital events) are recorded (or are attributed) to the geographical area where they were present (or occurred) at a specified time."

"The de jure population is a concept under which individuals (or vital events) are recorded (or are attributed) to a geographical area on the basis of the place of residence."

Here's a method on how estimates are done (though you can't tell if this method was used by the nations who provided the data for the spreadsheets):

On Estimating a De Facto Population and Its Components[...]For purposes of discussing estimation methods, it is convenient to look at the concept of a De Facto population from the perspective that it consists of the following five elements: (1) visitor population; (2) homeless population; (3) seasonal population, which we subdivide into (a) the amenity seeking population and (b) migrant workers and their families; (4), the portion of the Daytime population that consists of residents from elsewhere; and (5) the De Jure population that is “present.” One reason for using these five categories is that they correspond roughly to the kinds of estimates (and projections) that are desired for De Facto populations (Akkerman, 2000; Happel and Hogan, 1987; 2002; Kavanaugh and Lamphere, 1989; Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, 2011a; Schmitt, 1956; 1968; Smith, 1989). Another reason is that these categories are important because of the impacts they have on the population numbers of the places were they are found. [...] (source)

I'll have to spend some time looking for the old rounds, it is a good idea I hadn't thought of.

That list of factors starts making the calculation complex. Like there are huge numbers of foreign students, foreign workers, others like retirees who are arguably residents but may be viewed as on long vacations. And then homeless - especially in Africa, South America. And I imagine the borders in Africa are like theoretical in nature. Not actually patrolled or even agreed upon borders.

In the Nigerian example, say a person is counted as being a resident of Lagos, Nigeria - say a man from another province going to the big city to make money for his family. He could easily be double counted in the census. Especially if the two provinces were rivals wanting to inflate their own census numbers. (assuming they aren't just outright making up numbers).

An interesting corollary to this regards a new popular fear that nations that have majorities of people who are of European descent, will soon be swamped by hundreds of millions of non-European peoples. And then rapidly those Europeans would become minorities in their nations.

Yet if the developing world countries in the global south, actually have 1/3rd their claimed populations, it means people of European descent are a far larger proportion of the global population than we think.

aa5 comments: India car sales did grow by 9% last year to reach 3 million units. Which makes India the 5th largest auto market in terms of unit sales. Behind China, USA, Japan and Germany - and just ahead of France, Britain, Brazil and Italy.

Say there was a nation with 1.2 billion people(allegedly 3 times the population of the EU), one would think GM would be interested in that market.

I am noticing there is comparisons between Brazil & India. They both are sort of their own worlds, which don't interact much with other countries. They have their own media, cinema and so forth. Both countries are geographically very large, and both obviously have large populations. With large geography providing many resources and large populations creating internal markets of sufficient scale to have industrial enterprises, they simply don't need to interact with other countries much.

But there is a glaring difference between Brazil & India. Brazil claims to have 205 million people, while India is claiming over 1.2 billion people. The Brazil claim of 205 million people to me seems reasonable(if possibly a little on the high side). Eg.. I would compare Brazilian number and size of cities with Japan. Japan claims to have 125 million people which I think is accurate. Brazil seems significantly less populous than the USA, which has 320 million people - which I also think is accurate.

But Brazil seems more populous than Britain. Britain has 64 million people. So I put Brazil with a low estimate of 100 million people and a high estimate of 205 million people.

aa5 wrote:I am noticing there is comparisons between Brazil & India. They both are sort of their own worlds, which don't interact much with other countries. They have their own media, cinema and so forth. Both countries are geographically very large, and both obviously have large populations. With large geography providing many resources and large populations creating internal markets of sufficient scale to have industrial enterprises, they simply don't need to interact with other countries much.

That´s pretty much my own impression.

I suppose the invention of the BRICS concept has helped promote the notion that Brazil and India have a lot in common.

Assuming the figures 320 million (US) and 205 million (Brazil) are correct, the population density would be around 40/sq.km in the contiguous US and around 24/sq.km in Brazil.

The curious thing is that when you travel in the countryside of Brazil you see people (or signs of human activity) everywhere. It´s been decades since I was last in the US, but I remember seeing nothing but empty expanses of desert, mountains or woodlands as soon as I left the strictly urban zone.

America seems to have unlimited urban space for avenues, parking lots, gardens, freeways, schools, mega-stores. Brazilian towns and cities are like crowded anthills. Every inch is precious and hotly disputed. Traffic is less congested in the Netherlands (413/sq.km) than in Brazil. Also, real estate is surprisingly expensive, as if there wasn´t enough room for everybody!

Maybe it´s just a question of culture, customs, priorities, public administration ... dunno.